Ganahl Lumber Simplifies Multi-Site Network Management

Name: Ganahl Lumber Simplifies Multi-Site Network Management
Uploaded: 2026-07-15T17:39:27-04:00
Duration: 2 min 31 s
Description: Andy Takis, IT Manager at Ganahl Lumber Company, shares how Fortinet helps California’s oldest operating lumber yard simplify networking and security across multiple locations. Hear how Ganahl uses FortiGate, FortiSwitch, FortiManager, and FortiAnalyze...

Fortinet

07/15/2026

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Transcript

I'm the IT manager at Ganahl Lumber Company. Ganahl Lumber, we're California's oldest still operating lumber yard and hardware store. The company was founded in 1884. We mostly cater to the professional. So we have 14 locations now across LA, Orange County, Riverside, and as of about a month and a half ago, San Diego. Our stores and yards range from, let's say, two acres all the way up to 20. It's a lot of outdoor, so getting wireless coverage sort of everywhere where you don't have a lot of opportunity to place APs and you have the wood sort of blocking signal all over the place presents kind of an interesting challenge for us. So before Fortinet was really, I would say like fully onboarded, it was just a lot of fragmentation, manual configurations all over the place, a lot of switching gear without passwords. Some of the challenges we faced too was we had a very fragmented LAN. So we had FortiGates doing sort of traditional perimeter security stuff, but we also had a different SD-WAN solution. So it was very complicated to get all of those pieces to route and interoperate with each other or not step on each other. So troubleshooting was challenging. Now it's all together in one shot, so it's been a lot simpler and easier to manage. The Fortinet products we're using today are like everybody, FortiGate, FortiSwitch, which has been great, all managed by FortiManager, FortiAnalyzer. We are a very small team compared to maybe what people would expect. And having templatized configurations has been huge, especially for rollouts. It just makes things so simple. I'm a huge fan of simplicity and consistency. I'm a big proactive person too. And again, the consistency, simplicity, stability, to me, those are all ways that you get to be proactive by not fighting fires all the time or everything's different in this location than that location, which again, it was before. We compress and change things to make simplicity be one of our kind of ruling design principles.

TL;DR

Ganahl Lumber, a 14-location California lumber chain, replaced a fragmented multi-vendor network with a unified Fortinet stack including FortiGate, FortiSwitch, FortiManager, and FortiAnalyzer.
Before Fortinet, the environment suffered from manual configurations, unsecured switching gear, and a separate SD-WAN solution that made routing and troubleshooting unnecessarily complex.
Templatized configurations via FortiManager have been transformative for a small IT team, enabling consistent, repeatable rollouts across all locations with minimal overhead.

Summary

Andy Takis, IT Manager at Ganahl Lumber Company — California's oldest operating lumber yard, founded in 1884 — describes how consolidating onto Fortinet's networking stack transformed operations across 14 locations spanning Los Angeles, Orange County, Riverside, and San Diego. Before the transition, Ganahl's environment was highly fragmented: manual configurations, switching gear without passwords, and a mix of FortiGate firewalls alongside a separate SD-WAN solution that created complex routing and interoperability headaches. Troubleshooting was difficult and inconsistent across sites. After fully onboarding Fortinet — deploying FortiGate, FortiSwitch, FortiManager, and FortiAnalyzer as an integrated stack — the lean IT team gained centralized, templatized configuration management that dramatically simplified rollouts and day-to-day operations. Takis emphasizes that consistency and simplicity are now core design principles, enabling a proactive IT posture rather than constant firefighting. The outdoor nature of Ganahl's large lumber yards, where wood stock blocks wireless signals and access point placement is limited, adds a unique physical infrastructure challenge that the Fortinet platform helps address through unified management and visibility.

Chapters

0:00 - Ganahl Lumber Introduction
0:27 - Wireless Coverage Challenges
0:49 - Pre-Fortinet Fragmentation
1:31 - Fortinet Stack & Simplified Management

Key Quotes

0:49 "Before Fortinet was really, I would say like fully onboarded, it was just a lot of fragmentation, manual configurations all over the place, a lot of switching gear without passwords."
1:25 "Now it's all together in one shot, so it's been a lot simpler and easier to manage."
1:47 "Having templatized configurations has been huge, especially for rollouts. It just makes things so simple."
2:19 "We compress and change things to make simplicity be one of our kind of ruling design principles."

FAQ

What Fortinet products does Ganahl Lumber use?

Ganahl Lumber uses FortiGate for perimeter security and SD-WAN, FortiSwitch for LAN switching, FortiManager for centralized and templatized configuration management, and FortiAnalyzer for network analytics and visibility.

What were the main IT challenges Ganahl Lumber faced before adopting Fortinet?

The team dealt with a highly fragmented network environment — manual configurations across sites, switching gear without passwords, and a separate SD-WAN solution running alongside FortiGate that created complex routing conflicts and made troubleshooting difficult.

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TL;DR

Summary

Chapters

Key Quotes

FAQ

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